FASHION THERAPY

That all-too-rare fashion moment when you are in the front row of a fashion show and something makes you sit up and take notice happened to me during the spring/ ­summer 2011 collections.

That stand-out moment came at the Giles show in London. It wasn’t the clothes, it wasn’t even the parade of the biggest modelling stars of the moment: ­Agyness, Amber, Karolina, Chanel . . .

No, what made me stare was the sight of the model who was given the honour of wearing the final outfit.

Magnificent: Veruschka in the Giles show at this year's London Fashion Week, left, and in French
Vogue at the height of her fame in the late Sixties

She was tall, she had a huge red slash of a mouth and cheekbones that soared. No one seemed to know who she was, but to me the face and the body were unmistakable. She was 71 years old. She was Veruschka.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Veruschka changed ­fashion for good. She was the first superstar model of the Sixties. Her six-foot frame, with its improbably long limbs, was revolutionary, ­following as it did the more womanly shapes of the models that came before her.

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When the director Antonioni came to London in 1965 to film Blow Up, the fashion movie that defined the decade, he cast Veruschka as the model who cavorts in front of the lens of the ­character based on David Bailey.

Veruschka single-handedly started the trend to be super- thin; Twiggy burst on to the scene only once the film was in the can.

When I track down Veruschka at her home in Berlin, a few weeks after her appearance at London Fashion Week, and ask if she feels responsible for the seismic shift in fashion that has never really gone away, she laughs — a deep, throaty laugh.

‘I was tall and I was thin. But just before shooting started I had been on a fashion assignment in Mexico and became terribly sick from drinking the water. I lost so much weight and was really ill and weak when I made the movie.’

Start of the super-thin trend: Veruschka admits she was too thin when she played a model who cavorts in front of the lens of the ­character based on David Bailey in the film Blow Up

Dysentery. Not the most glamorous of muses for a new look. I ask what she thought, at the Giles show, being ­surrounded by 16-year-olds.

‘I was in my 20s when I made the movie and found success. We were women, not children.’

But wasn’t her presence on the catwalk part of a wonderful new trend for fashion to be more inclusive . . . bigger models, older models?

Veruschka believes she was a gimmick and that designers no longer have the skills to dress women who are not ­children with bodies that look like ironing boards.

‘I didn’t like the make-up in the show, and didn’t think much of the dress. Now we are using the old ones, make them look great and show their power as well as their age.’

She is as dismissive of the trend for ­vertiginous shoes.

‘In the Sixties, fashion was about liberation. It was about setting women free; it wasn’t about being unable to walk.’

Veruschka was born Vera Von Lehndorff. Her father was Count Heinrich Von Lehndorff.

Blown away

Veruschka’s scene in the film Blow Up has been voted the sexiest cinema moment in history

During World War II, Hitler’s bunker was in the grounds of her home.

‘My parents led this double life. They were in the underground movement to bring down the Nazis. My father was hanged for being a traitor.

‘My mother, who was in her 30s, was left with four ­children. She was put in prison and we were thrown into a camp for children of resistance ­fighters. When the war ended, we were refugees. We had lost absolutely everything.’

Veruschka grew up wanting to be an artist and made her way to Florence, which is where she was spotted, aged 20, by a photographer and asked if she wanted to be a model.

She ended up living in New York and Paris, and was the Kate Moss of her day. It’s an incredible life story; she is ­collaborating on a biography, to be published next year, called ­Double Life.

She still has an incredible face, though she tells me she is ‘a few inches shorter’.

I ask Veruschka if it is harder to grow old when you have been a great beauty. ‘No, it has not been hard to grow older, because I believe if you have something you believe in that will keep you alive far more than plastic surgery or Botox,’ she says.

‘I know that there are many things I could do, but I’m not interested. It’s more important to be loving and to have a lively mind.’